Baltimore Evening Sun (12 August 1912): 6.

From the estimable Maryland Suffrage News:

The respectable element in the Democratic party, including therewith the Baltimore Sun * * *

Thanks, ladies: thanks awfully! Again, thanks! Merci! Much obliged!

Further contributions to the thesaurus of American synonyms for money:

Rhino. Jurisprudence. Graphite. Rocks. Honey. Anesthetic.

The Hon. Charles J. Ogle, secretary of the Maryland Tax Reform Association, in today’s Letter Column:

As natural opportunities (access to land in various forms) are monopolized. * * * The source of all wealth, the land * * *

And so on, and so on. The Single Tax gospel rests firmly upon this fallacy: that the land is the sole source of wealth, that the only evidence of criminal opulence is the monopolization of some part of it. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. In half of Maryland, for example, the sea produces as much wealth as the land—and there is no private ownership of the sea. Again, even admitting that every man must have land to live on and that he may have to pay rent for it, isn’t it a fact that his net income is chiefly determined, not by his landlord’s generosity, but by the talents he brings to his work? Isn’t it a fact, in other words, that the world decides pretty accurately the value of the stuff that each of us has for sale, and that the vast majority of men, in the long run, get just what they deserve?

True enough, the landlord himself may do nothing for the money he receives. The house he owns, for example, may have come to him from his father, who may have won it shooting dice. But if you dispute his full title to it, if you deny his right to collect rent for it, then you deny the morality of interest. For rent from land, however bitterly the Single Taxers may deny it, is obviously interest on capital. How that capital accumulated is immaterial. The important fact is that it exists in the land and that it is as much entitled to its interest as any other capital. Are we to go back to Basil, Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyassa, and denounce all interest as immoral?

What the Hon. Mr. Ogle overlooks is that, when society puts money into a man’s hands, it also gives him the right to employ it. Mere capital, without that right, would be an empty thing. Going further, it gives him the right to choose his manner of employing it, within limits fixed by considerations of public safety. He may, if he desires, dissipate it upon his own pleasures. On the contrary, he may hand it on to his children. The important thing is that his right to choose is as much a part of his reward as the capital itself. Efficiency is stimulated, the distinguished man is encouraged, the progress of the world is enhanced by this freedom of the capitalist. Destroy it and you destroy the greatest of all incentives to human endeavor. True enough, you may succeed thereby in ameliorating the lot of the fifth-rate man, but you will also break the spirit of the firstrate man. And human progress is wholly the business of the first-rate man. The fifth-rate man nearly always profits by it, but he certainly doesn’t take part in it.

The Hon. Mr. Ogle makes much of the fact that capital, at times, may be the fruit, not of merit, but of luck. But that is wholly beside the point. As he himself shows, the success of such men as Abraham Lincoln was due to luck so much as to merit. Are we therefore to deny them their rewards? I think not. Merit itself is a form of luck. The fact that I myself have certain virtues—that I am not a loafer, that I do not wear jewelry, that I refrain, under sore temptation, from killing my wife—is to be put to the credit of my remote ancestors as much as to my own. And yet, I do not hesitate to accept the rewards of such virtues, in victuals, liberty and public veneration. If my remote ancestors, going further, had also left me capital, I should take interest on it today with the same equanimity.

Call it luck, call it merit, call it the favor of God, call it whatever you will—the fact persists that some men are better fitted to make their way in the world than other men. The Hon. Mr. Ogle does not argue that the Single Tax could change that great natural law: he merely argues that it might conceal it. Well, my answer is that civilization has already done enough to conceal it. Our sentimental coddling of the least fit has already cost us dear. Let us go no further in that direction. Let us beware of the Single Tax, Socialism, wholesale charity and all other such plots against the superior man. If progress is to continue, that superior man must have reasonable freedom. No progress has ever come by knocking him in the head, or by forcing him to fetch and carry for those unable or unwilling to fetch and carry for themselves.

Astounding remarks of the Democratic Telegram, the super-Mahon’s false whiskers:

Now comes a proposition that * * * there should be endowed newspapers * * * published by municipalities. * * * The reason for this demand is that existing newspapers are not reliable, either as purveyors of news or of opinions, and that something should be done to give the country newspapers that would be entirely trustworthy.

What! Can it be that the Hot Towel is not giving satisfaction? Could tallowing further go? Is it possible that the oleomania of the Customer is more virulent, more insatiable, more consuming than the oleomania of the Operator? Does the thirst to be greased actually exceed the frenzy to grease?

How local option works on the Eastern Shore, as recorded by the estimable Pocomoke City Ledger-Enterprise:

On Friday of last week the steamboat landed at Pocomoke City one hundred and seventy barrels of Rikk and beer, to say nothing of the large number of boxes labeled whisky. How is that for a dry town, with over twenty Rikk and beer counters in the corporation, corrupting and ruining the youth and old alike?

What Rikk may be I don’t know. Obviously, some form of near-beer. No doubt the successor of Ambrosia, that delight of the Eastern Shore dry towns in days gone by.

Boil your drinking water! Cover your garbage can! Look out for Burns!

From the impious Evening Newspaper of Sunday:

It is announced by Mr. Shaw that a permanent branch of the Burns agency will be opened in Baltimore within the next few days.

Lured and trapped by the Factory Site Commission, pall-borne by the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association, wooed and seduced by the Greater Baltimore Committee!